slow win2k domain logon on new Dell Dimension XP machines

we have a win2k server defining a small domain (no more than a dozen PCs belong to this domain) on a 10/100 network.

Recently we got new XP Pro preconfigured Dell Dimension desktops. These have a choice of broadcom gigabit or Intel pro/100 cards (there are 2 cards in the PC). Both seem to work but we decided to use the Intel (as we are not on a gigabit network) option and it reports to be working at 10 Mbit mode

access to the net is fine BUT logon from these machines to the win2k domain is SLOOOOOOOW (2 minutes at least).. takes a while to load the settings and then apply them

the user profiles are very large on these machines (80 MB etc.) but the profiles for the same users on other machines are less than 1 MB. I am not sure if this is the issue.

I tried looking for similar problems on EE and tried tweaking some MMC settings (something about logon) but to no avail. For what it is worth all of the settings in MMC for the older machines (they use 3com cards) are also not configured and there is no systematic difference that I can tell.

Would appreciate any tips to address the slow login and large user profiles problem.. AFAIK both xp and win2k are patched.
So its not clear why these DELL machines have this problem.

I check the network activity on the DELL machines it is very less compared to the older machines (where for some reason there are tons of packets being processed by the 3 com card)

You may experience extremely long delays (up to 5 minutes) when logging into domains using Windows XP Pro. This is caused by the asyncronous loading of networking during the boot up process. This speeds up the login process in a stand-alone workstation by allowing the user to log in with cached logon credentials before the network is fully ready.

To disable this "feature" and restore your domain logons to their normal speed, open the MMC and add the group policy snap-in. Under Computer Configuration-->Administrative Templates-->System-->Logon, change "Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon" to ENABLED.

This can be fed to clients via a group policy from a Windows 2000 server by upgrading the standard policy template with the XP policy template. Since this is an XP only command, non-XP systems will ignore it in a domain distributed group policy.

y default, the History, Local Settings, Temp, and Temporary Internet Files folders are excluded from a user's profile. This means that these folders are not stored on the network and do not follow the user from PC to PC.

You can exclude addition folders by ADDing the Default Domain Policy to the MMC and setting Exclude

directories in roaming profile, by navigating through User Configuration\Administrative

Templates\System\Logon/Logoff.

There is no way to use this policy to include the folders that are excluded by default.

The results of the GPO are stored in the registry at:

HKEY_CURRENT_UsER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System\ExcludeProfileDirs. The

ExcludeProfileDirs value name is a REG_SZ data type, that stores the additional excluded folders in

Folder-name[;Folder-name...] format.

If you subsequently disable the policy, or set it to Not configured, Group Policy deletes the ExcludeProfileDirs

Both Win2K Server and WinXP Pro are built to use DNS for name resolution preferred over NetBIOS name resolution. What happens in the cases in which DNS is used and NetBIOS over IP is disabled, is that there is no confusion over which name resolution method to use, so it goes straight to DNS and finds the login server right away.

If the name-resolution priority gets confused by having NetBIOS over IP enabled, and WINS is not running (since Win2K and WinXP Pro don't "NEED" WINS, but prefer DNS, I don't know why just having that protocol enabled makes a difference) and you don't specify your Win2K server as a DNS server, it does a browse of the entire stinkin' network looking for a Master Browser instead of using DNS to find its login server.

However, if the login server is first-in-line for DNS, even with NetBIOS over IP enabled, it knows which server to go to anyway, and tries that first instead of browsing the LAN looking for it's Master Browser or DNS server.

There have been a lot of times when we have seen the need to enter a large number of DNS entries in a forward lookup zone.
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